After
by SJlikeslists
Summary: This one shot collection features the thoughts of different characters after the series ends. (Periodic additions may occur.)
1. Lucas

Disclaimer: _Terra Nova_ is not mine.

Lucas had always liked equations. There was something soothing about the regularity of them. They were predictable. They were standard. Even the most difficult of them abided within the confines of a set of rules that allowed you to use them in any manner which appealed to you. Equations, numbers, formulas - they were all things that he could master. He could work them; he could manage them. He could use them, and Lucas had always been very fond of things that he could use. He had a special sort of fondness for the deluded individuals that thought that they were using him when they were really only a cog in the wheel of his own plans. They amused him in a somewhat morbid fashion - his sense of humor had always tended toward the morbid.

He had never doubted that he would eventually do the job for which he had been recruited and sent to Terra Nova in the first place. It was only a matter of learning the right numbers, finding the right formulas, and creating the proper equations. It had never been a question of if he succeeded. It had only been a question of when he would work his way to the proper combinations. He was methodical. Some might even be inclined to suggest that he was slow. Those comments were few and far between from his so called partners in this venture - they knew better than to make him angry. Angry did not make him work any faster. Angry only made him shrug his shoulders and suggest that he might just slip off into the jungle and never be heard from again.

He, of course, would never have done that. He was too invested in the necessity of solving the equations that littered rocks in the midst of a waterway where no one but he and his father ever bothered to venture. He never liked to leave things unfinished. It gave an appearance of him being incapable, and he would never allow the barest hint of that to occur. He did, after all, have pride in his own abilities. He was equally invested in seeing his father's face when he realized what had happened to his precious little second chance.

His father was a fool with his idealistic little speeches that he made as each new set of arrivals came to the colony. People did not get second chances; second chances could not change mistakes made. Second chances could not rectify blood spilt. There was no starting over and pretending that the dead in your wake did not haunt you at every turn. Clinging to the idea of second chances was for the weak willed of the world - the ones like his father who pretended that the past was something that you got to walk away from when it did not suit you.

No, he never would have given up on making the portal into Terra Nova function equally as well in the other direction. His associates did not know that though, and he had no qualms about leaving them in doubt and watching them squirm. He did not appreciate attitude from people who sat in the background and did not have the investment into the project that he did. Lucas had bled for his cause. He was still bleeding for it.

He was back again wandering through the jungle injured and undersupplied. It was not the first time that had happened to him. If he was going to be stuck in this place for longer, then it would (sadly) likely not be the last. Injured was practically the static state of being here. He had long ago decided that it did not matter where or when you were - nature was always out to get you. You just had to be smart enough to outwit nature. He was good at that - had a natural affinity for it even. Nature was fundamentally simple just like equations. You just had to be aware of the rules.

People were the problem. People were the things that took all of the rules and flipped them around. People inserted chaos into situations. It did not matter how much you studied them or understood their motivations; there was always the chance that they would abandon all order and reason and do something random that gummed up all the works. He hated dealing with people as much as he craved interaction with them. It was a shame that people were not inherently wired to be solitary. It was a shame that solitude drove them to want to bask in the presence of others even when those others were completely unworthy. He had suffered for that inclination. He was bleeding for it even now as he made his way toward a temporary resting place so that he could get his bearings (and stop leaving a trail for every predator in the area). He needed to regroup. He needed to think. He needed to get his head clear and redefine a few places in his thought processes.

She was completely unworthy in her worthiness. That was just another reason to hate people - Skye. She was supposed to understand. In fact, he was certain that she did understand. She had seen exactly what their father was. She had been faced with his callousness firsthand. She had borne his disappointed cold shouldering and judgment as he expected her to have even considered trading her mother's life to be loyal to him. She knew. She had seen, and she still chose him in the end. That was deeply disappointing.

Lucas did not care for being disappointed. He had had quite enough of it over the course of his life. He was adding now to the list of people who would need to be corrected. His father and Skye were probably sitting somewhere thinking that they had bested him. That would not last for long. Lucas did not get bested. He only got delayed. He was good at biding his time; he had always had to be. His father would be hearing from him again soon, and Skye . . . well, Bucket would be seeing him sooner over later.

He picked up his pace and ignored the pain that was shooting through him with each step. He had places to be; he had plans to make. He had work to do; he had so much work to do. He was going to be very, very busy, and he was going to make the others very busy as well.


	2. Mira

Disclaimer: _Terra Nova_ is not mine.

She didn't believe them at first when they insisted that something had gone seriously wrong with the connection. How could something like that just be gone? How would you be able to tell? It wasn't as though they were dealing with something three dimensional that you could see was broken.

The physical structure of the portal on this side was the only thing keeping anything passing through from being spit out in random places. She had heard the stories; they all had. When it was gone, there was no real way to predict where people (or things) might end up landing. She understood that the structure was gone again. That didn't mean that the portal itself somehow stopped working. She didn't understand how that could happen. The science of the whole process had never been her concern, but she thought the basics had been fairly straightforward. She didn't pretend to care about anything other than doing what she was told so that she could get back to her daughter.

The fact remained that there was no signal to be raised on the device that had allowed her to keep contact with the other side during those years of making due out in the wild. There had been times when it had been plagued by various levels of static, but it had never before failed to work completely. It had never mattered before whether or not the portal was open on the other side the way that it had for the communication devices that Taylor had in his possession. The only explanation that made any sense to her was that it had been damaged in the hurried retreat as they pulled back from the occupation of Terra Nova to what those of them that had been long term residents always referred to as the Badlands. (It certainly made more sense to think the communication device was broken than to believe that something had dislodged a natural phenomenon and caused it to cease to exist.)

Everything had moved so quickly that they had all been in grab and go mode. There had been little time for questions, and Mira had followed their lead because it was what she had been instructed to do. She had been so close to the end of her service that she had taken to biting her tongue and biding her time until it was all over, and it hadn't occurred to her to start making noise about what they were doing until they were already setting up a camp of sorts.

It wasn't a sensible place for them to go (unless one was only thinking about discouraging others from following). She knew how to keep her people mostly taken care of in the density of the trees. They understood that landscape, and they had ways of mitigating the dangers. They had never tried to do their living in the Badlands for a reason. The area had not been named "Badlands" because they were short of names with which to label things on their maps. It wasn't a place to stay for any length of time, but she had no choice but to stick around if she wanted answers. She also needed help (as unwilling as she was to admit to that).

The years hadn't been easy on her people, and she no longer had anyone who would be able to do anything more than tinker with their radio and hope for the best. She needed one of the soldiering types who specialized in communication to tackle the problem for her. She didn't like it, but she wasn't going to lose their chance at getting back in contact just because she didn't care for the people she had to ask. Her people had people they needed to check on; she had someone she needed to check on, and she wasn't going to let those on the other side think that they had any reason to start cutting loose ends. She wasn't, however, having much luck (none really) with getting her plea for technical assistance acknowledged.

She knew the invaders had a chip on their collective shoulder and considered her people some sort of barbaric necessary evil with which they had to put up for a brief period of time so that they could go on to better things, but she was not in the mood to tolerate the brush off that she was receiving. Mira was nothing if not determined. She had no difficulties being pushy, and she had no difficulties making difficulties for others if she felt that was what needed to happen. Obviously, that was what needed to happen to garner the appropriate amount of attention.

The conversation (when she finally managed to force the issue) wasn't pretty. (It was also unnecessarily difficult, but she had become strangely accustomed to everything since she arrived at Terra Nova being unnecessarily difficult.) Nothing in the conversation made her any happier than she had been when she entered it. It also did nothing to decrease her frustration levels (which, in turn, meant that she was even more inclined to cause whatever difficulties she could). It ended with the necessity of a further conversation that led to another and another.

Clearly, the man nominally in charge believed that something unthinkable had happened and believed that he had been stranded by whatever it was that had gone down at the two way portal site. Mira had no patience for his muttering. It didn't make any sense for some human action to have closed the window that they hadn't opened in the first place. This was just another temporary setback (an incredibly unwelcome one that left her growling low in her throat in the midst of all of her conversations).

She had been so close to getting back to her child. The timeline had finally shrunk from indefinite to a matter of days when everything had gone wrong. She was not in a mood to be kind toward the people who had demanded that the initial loads of supplies make the first trip back through the portal instead of the people who had been promised their passage back in return for their service. Every additional day she was away from her daughter was something she intended to see that they pay heavily for when everything got back around to the way that it should be.

The short summary of her multiple conversations with the rather distracted leadership of the people who (for all they had been sent to take over) didn't seem to really understand the place where they had come was that they were in the Badlands trying to find something that they refused to tell her about. They didn't care one way or another whether her people stayed with them or went. She just wanted her radio fixed. They refused to spend the time. It was a stubborn and dismissive standstill that lasted three days.

It took that long for them to realize that whatever it was they were looking for wasn't going to be found before the meager supplies they had with them dwindled down to nothing. That was where Mira found her leverage. Her people knew how to survive. These others hadn't come prepared to need to do that. It took two more days for the seriousness of their situation to impress itself upon them enough for them to agree to Mira's terms. (The fact that the Badlands were notoriously lacking in water worked in her favor.)

Someone looked over her radio and informed her that it was in perfect working order. She may or may not have knocked the man to the floor and held him down with a foot resting against his throat while she demanded that they knock off their game playing. (She had been rather at the end of her tolerance and the details were a little fuzzy.) Eventually, the true desperation she saw in the eyes of those around her sunk in; they believed that there was no more Hope Plaza. They believed that no one was coming. They believed that all of their plans had failed.

They also believed that there was something in the Badlands that would mitigate that, but they still weren't sharing. She thought she could have pushed for those answers, but she couldn't think straight. She could only think of her daughter. She could only think of how she had let her down. She could only think that all of this had been for nothing.

They believed that it was so. She didn't know if she believed they were right. She needed them to not be right. It couldn't all have been for nothing.

If she was really trapped here with no way to get back to her child . . .

If she had really done all of this only to leave her little girl on a dying world with no one to take care of her . . .

If all of it really was true, then she knew exactly whom she was going to hold responsible.

She would spend every last breath she had in her making certain that Taylor paid.


	3. Malcolm

Disclaimer: _Terra Nova_ does not belong to me.

Malcolm liked to think that he was holding up rather well given the chaos that had engulfed them. He had had a front row seat to what might without exaggeration have been termed a coup, been repeatedly threatened, watched an assistant be murdered, dealt with a clearly mentally unstable person demanding he work for him, and was coping with the fact that their supposed only link to the world from which they had come had been intentionally severed.

It was a lot to take in, and he thought he was doing it all rather calmly (for the most part).

The science of the portal was not his field in particular (although he liked to think that he had a relatively nice grounding in a wide variety of the sciences), but his forced labor on the damaged equipment had brought several items to the forefront of his attention that he had never before taken the time to think through to their logical conclusions (any thoughts that had distracted him from the image of blood running down the broken glass had been welcome ones while he was trying to work as slowly as possible without looking like he was working as slowly as possible).

As far as anyone could tell, the gate between worlds that had brought them here had been a completely natural phenomenon of undetermined origin. That brought up a series of questions that he felt it would be in their best interests to consider.

If they could randomly open, then could they also randomly close? This was an obvious question that he hadn't bothered with before. He didn't bother with it much now either (given that they had more pressing issues on their hands). It was the question that followed that was swirling around in his head on an endless loop. If one portal existed, then why would there not be others?

The anomaly was something that had belied all the rules of conventional physics when it was discovered originally. It seemed short sighted (and, quite frankly, impractical) to pretend as if it was a one off that had a zero percent chance of ever happening again.

The problem remained how to find one.

They hadn't gone looking for the portal in Hope Plaza. They had created Hope Plaza around a stumbled upon portal - one that had opened up in the middle of downtown Chicago (making it rather difficult to ignore).

Why not more? And, more to the point, why should they not be looking for them?

There were practicalities of course. They had just been (theoretically) cut off from their original dimension. As far as the conventional wisdom went - humanity was down to just over 1000 people plus a couple of dozen members of a mercenary group that had high tailed it out of Dodge with the remaining Sixers and headed straight for the Badlands. This seemed, to him at least, to indicate that they also believed that there was another chance at a portal - might even indicate that they had a lead on one out there. There was no other discernibly practical reason to make the Badlands one's base of operations. That was no one's place to set up surviving on one's own. The Sixers kept to the jungle - where it was easier to hide and easier to find things that they might need.

The Badlands wasn't just a name. It was a designation - it was quite literally too bad of a section of land for any humans to attempt to live in it. There was not enough water. There were not enough plants for forage while one attempted to set up some sort of sustainable food source. There was not enough wildlife of the right varieties to keep anyone fed for very long (let alone a group). No one went there if they could avoid it. There was no reason to believe that anyone was desperate enough (or ill-informed enough) to set up shop out there.

They were either looking for something or expecting something to find them out there. It was the only explanation. They only thing that they could be looking for and they only way that something might be coming to them out there were one and the same - another anomaly. The contents of that traded out shipping container only confirmed his thoughts. The only way that could have gotten there was via transport from another world. It meant there had been another opening.

The Badlands had been an orderly fallback position - not a random choice. That meant their colony had a continuing threat. It also meant that their colony had options.

This seemed obvious to him. Sadly, he was the only one that seemed to be willing to say something to that effect (even if there was anyone else who could see the rationale for the conclusion). His opinion on the subject was not wanted. That was made perfectly clear. He could take a hint. He had also had enough. He was tired of dealing calmly. He needed to go off and find a spot where he would be decidedly not calm (for at least a few minutes) without anyone staring at him like he had lost his mind.

"Malcolm! Wait." He stopped his rather rapid clip, but he did not turn to face her. He really should have just kept on walking, but he didn't want her following him. It was better to let her say whatever it was and get it over with so he could go regain his composure in peace. He mentally snorted at the irony of the fact that _now_ she wanted to talk.

"Look, I know that you're . . .," she started when she had caught up and circled around so that she was facing him.

"Don't," he interrupted finding that he really didn't possess enough tolerance for being told some platitude about how the meeting had gone. "Your silence on the subject when it actually mattered was duly noted." She had the audacity to frown at him when she registered his tone. Frankly, that set him off and he let the words come tumbling out of him. "Taylor thinks that because he ran around in the wilderness and kept himself from dying for a few months that everyone can just brush themselves off and do the same. He's being short sighted on this. He's right that no one is going to be starving to death in a couple of days, but this place is not long term self-sustaining yet. Given what happened, it wouldn't be out of bounds to conclude that maybe we were never intended to be. We depended on shipments coming through that portal for a wide variety of items that we simply cannot replicate here. We have almost no manufacturing capabilities. This place runs on a multitude of equipment that will eventually wear out or break in an unrepairable manner - not the least of which are the components for our power grid that keep these fences on and our protective service weapons charged."

"We'll have to find work arounds," she admitted. "This place is a goldmine of undiscovered resources."

"That takes time, Elisabeth. How many people are we going to lose in the meantime? You should know better than anyone how dependent we are on imports here and how close to the edge things can be. How many medications are gone from your clinic already?"

She didn't offer an answer. They both knew that there was no honest one she could give that wouldn't make his point for him. The questions kept pouring out of him.

"Are you ready to try to go back to doing things like stitches? To cutting people open for internal surgeries? To lose your electronic diagnostic tools? To treating fevers with teas and hoping you can keep wounds clean enough because you don't have anything certain you can use on infections?"

"Enough," she interrupted. "I know, okay? I know we have a lot of potential problems on our hands, but this is already fait accompli. This is already where we are, and we just have to do the best we can with it."

"Until they circle around and attack us from the back."

"You don't know that that is what they are doing."

"None of them," he made a sweeping gesture in the direction of the conference room where they had held their meeting, "know that they aren't."

"They aren't blowing off your concerns, Malcolm." She tried to sound reassuring. He simply looked at her. "I know how it sounded in there, but they really aren't. There are just a lot of things to deal with all at once, and they are trying their best to work through them."

"We may not have time for them to bother getting around to it."

"So don't wait for them to catch up." That actually short circuited the tide of indignation that had been fueling him through the conversation.

"What?"

"The science division is your jurisdiction, Malcolm. No one is micromanaging you. What are you going to do with it?"

What indeed. He looked at the woman in front of him consideringly for a moment.

"You have suggestions," he stated rather than asked. He knew that expression on her face. He remembered it. He also remembered that it usually preceded something both disconcerting and brilliant. (Which, if he stopped to think about it, was something they were probably going to need quite a lot of in the coming days. That was alright - he wasn't completely devoid of moments of brilliance himself.)

"Let's talk."


End file.
